Serpentine

by Thomas Thompson

  The trouble was, thought Charles as he hung up, he had no access to the rich and famous customers, being trapped in a steaming kitchen and made to wear an absurd and towering chef’s hat under which his ears stuck out like semaphore flags. Sometimes he crept to the doorway and caught glimpses of the elegant restaurant as large as an airplane hangar. La Coupole was a mecca, particularly at midnight, for tout Paris, the clubhouse where fashions were born and money displayed and blue jeans sat next to Givenchy. “My problem,” said Charles years later, recalling these forbidden sights glimpsed through swinging doors, “was in getting from the kitchen to one of those tables. I knew I would sit there someday—the trouble was, I couldn’t wait.”

  One night a waiter found Charles peeling vegetables and said a customer had asked for him by name. Who? wondered Charles. The waiter shrugged: the customer had not identified himself. Some man dining alone. Seemed prosperous. Well dressed. Foreign. Charles approached the chef and asked for permission to enter the sacred dining hall. The answer was: Be quick about it.

  Making his way through the crowded room, Charles approached the table and noticed that the customer was indeed eying him attentively. He rose, and Charles admired his well-cut suit and silk tie. “Gurmukh?” said the man tentatively. Charles was confused. No one had called him by that hated name for years.

  The man held out his hand in greeting. “I am Sobhraj,” he said. Charles broke, rushing to his father, his chef’s hat falling from his head as he buried himself in the tailor’s strong arms and sobbed. He always knew his father would rescue him.

  Not precisely. Sobhraj the Tailor was in Paris as part of an around-the-world trip, combining vacation with business. In the years since he had casually surrendered his son to Song and the French officer, the tailor had grown wealthy. His one-room shop was now three separate stores, scattered along a better shopping district in Saigon. He employed several tailors, seamstresses, and he had customers who made special stop-offs in Saigon just to order one of his custom-made suits. A modest exporting business was in its infancy, and he had been in the United States to discuss marketing. Upon reaching Paris, he had telephoned Song in Marseilles and after a braggadocio conversation in which he could not resist informing his old mistress of his good fortune, the tailor learned that his son was working in Paris.

  Curiosity, nothing else, had brought him to La Coupole. But his son’s joy touched the tailor. They spent the next several days together, each revealing what the years had wrought. An enthusiastic guide, Charles proudly showed his father around Paris, speaking from time to time in four different languages, poised, intelligent, and dutiful. “I think,” said Sobhraj, “that you can become more in life than a waiter.”

  Oh, how Charles agreed! He hated his work, but his mother and stepfather had forced him into it. He spun tales from Oliver Twist—a cruel home life, unloved, yanked out of school and hurled into an adult world of fourteen-hour workdays, laboring in a kitchen so hot that the fluids evaporated from his body and made him weak and as thin as a celery stick.

  Moved by his son’s plight, Sobhraj made a proposition. He asked Song for permission to take Charles home to Saigon, where he would train the lad in the clothing business, pay him an adequate salary, and perhaps, just perhaps, one distant day the boy would inherit a piece of Hong Kong Tailors—H. Sobhraj, Importers, Inc.

  There was no hesitation. Song felt as if she had won the national lottery. Immediate permission rushed from her lips. But she pointed out that the boy did not have legal citizenship, not even a passport from any country. He had always traveled as a piece of family baggage among the possessions of Darreau. Then Sobhraj would make everything legal. He found a lawyer in Paris to draw up a contrat de travail which spelled out the conditions:

  WORK CONTRACT BETWEEN H. SOBHRAJ AND ALPHONSE DARREAU, CONCERNING THE BOY CHARLES:

  I will pay the cost of his trip from Paris to Saigon, and I will pay him a monthly salary of 7,000 Vietnamese piastres.

  After three years, I will give to Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj a 6-month vacation to spend in Vietnam or France, as he prefers.

  In case Charles wants to go to France on this vacation, I will also pay for the cost of that trip, and back to Saigon.

  In case Charles does not work out in Saigon, I will pay his way back to France, provided he completes one solid year of work.

  Both men, father and stepfather, signed the document with flourishes. Then Sobhraj went to the French passport office and obtained, with considerable difficulty, a safe-conduct travel document good only for one-way travel from France to Vietnam. It was the tailor’s plan to obtain Indian citizenship for the boy at the consul in Saigon. With a reputable businessman like Sobhraj vouching for the youngster, there should not be any question as to his eligibility.

  “I am in heaven,” wrote Charles to Song just before leaving Paris. “My dreams are answered. My father loves me and my life begins anew. A miracle!” It was the spring of 1961 and he was seventeen years old.

  But miracles are fragile, and a long time coming. When Charles arrived in Saigon, he found that once again he was an appendix. The tailor’s wife, Sao, had delivered four children to Sobhraj. Moreover, the tailor now no longer concealed the fact that he had another wife in India, who had presented him with five children, usually as souvenirs of his infrequent visits to the homeland. Charles counted up one day and figured that he had six half-brothers and sisters back in Marseilles, and nine more in the East. He was one child out of sixteen and the only one who had been thrown back and forth between Song and Sobhraj like an unwanted ball.

  Immediately Sao took Charles aside and hissed the rules of her household to him. His welcome was slim: she had more than enough to handle with the care and feeding of her own brood, and if Charles wished to stay he must fend for himself, obey his father, and not get in anybody’s way. Charles hated her. In later years he recalled that Sao always had a stick at arm’s length and the slightest misstep could bring it crashing onto his backside. One day Charles took it away from Sao and snapped it and tossed it into her face.

  The tailor posted a rigid work schedule. Charles was expected to rise before the sun, sweep away the scraps of cloth from the day before, clean and oil the sewing machines, wash the windows, prepare tea, and be ready to welcome customers at 9 A.M.—including translation of their wishes and measurements if they spoke French. Duties did not end until long after sundown, when the streets of Saigon were crowded with girls on promenade and music drifted out of every cafe. Once when the tailor and his son were strolling along a boulevard, Sobhraj noted a gaggle of young women and lectured on the danger therein. “Women are basically evil,” he always said. ‘There are only a few valuable ones, but they are as hard to find as a good diamond.” He warned Charles not to “mess up” his life by becoming entangled with bad women.

  Within a few weeks, Charles took to slipping away from work early, then not showing up at all. The police came one day to tell Sobhraj that a boy who had no papers but who represented himself as the tailor’s son was in jail on suspicion of car theft. Sao shrieked that she knew such grief and dishonor would come to her house. She knew it the moment the tailor foolishly brought this delinquent boy back from France. He was diseased—and he would surely infect her children as well. She had heard that Charles caroused in the cabarets and gambling dens of Saigon, with painted women draped about his pockets.

  Sobhraj the Tailor shushed his harping wife. He was not yet ready to give up on Charles. Enough guilt had been harbored in his heart over the years for having signed away his son to a Frenchman. At the Hindu temple in Saigon where Sobhraj prayed, he experienced a revelation. Clarity enveloped him. He ran to find a priest for counsel. The whole problem with Charles—and the holy man concurred—was that the young man simply did not know who he was nor where he belonged. He possessed no roots, no security, no feeling of membership in either a family or a national culture. The priest suggested that Sobhraj arrange citizenship for his truant son. “That is exac
tly what I plan to do,” said Sobhraj.

  He summoned the boy. At seventeen, Charles was a handsome young man with broad, muscled shoulders and the slimmest of waists. The tailor had much to tell. He had spent frustrating days at the Indian Consulate in Saigon, trying to obtain a passport and citizenship papers. But it had not been as easy as he had anticipated. India’s government would not bestow citizenship unless Charles spent a minimum of one year on Indian soil during which he had to become fluent in an Indian language. Therefore, the tailor had decided to send his son on one final journey—to Bombay. There he would go to a nearby village and spend the necessary year with distant cousins. Charles threw up his hands in dismay.

  “Papa, I must tell you that I am in love with a Vietnamese girl named Tra, and if you make me leave, both she and I will die of heartbreak,” said Charles theatrically. The tailor dismissed the prophecy. His son would only be in exile for one year, and during that time it would be possible to make at least one visit, perhaps two, back to Saigon. The Indian cousins were not wealthy, but they were respectable and hard-working, weavers of cheap cloth used in inexpensive saris.

  Panic grew and swept over Charles. He cried out that he was being abandoned again, the latest verse in his life anthem. Sobhraj shut his ears to all of this and booked passage for India.

  When the youth disembarked at Bombay, he was caught in a swarm of beggars, clutching at his arms and begging rupees. Sharp odors swam into his nostrils. He found a taxi and gave an address and learned that the village of his cousins was more than an hour from the sophistication of Bombay, in a poor suburb near Poona. The great hotels and apartment houses that overlooked the sea and that had seemed to welcome the youngster quickly disappeared in clouds of choking dust as the taxi carried Charles into rural India, where 85 per cent of the population lives.

  The house of his cousins was not a house by Charles’ definition—rather a one-room factory, perhaps twenty feet square, in which more than a dozen adults and uncounted children worked and ate and slept. Space is not wasted in India. A worktable in the day became a hard bed at night. The cousins spoke only Urdu, language of the Moghuls, and Charles could understand but a random word. He was expected to sleep on the ground and eat vegetarian meals, balls of mashed peas and potatoes fried in grease and set floating in fiery sauces. Everyone ate with their hands, dipping chunks of nan, the flat bread, into the foul liquids. Water dribbled from a rusty pipe that was the fountain of life for the entire village—when it flowed. Toilets were open trenches, running into bamboo groves where cobras sometimes waited.

  Twice Charles tried to escape from his country cousins. Working his way to Bombay, he sneaked aboard a freighter bound for Saigon and was thrown off immediately. A few days later he snaked up a rope after midnight and found a place to hide in another freighter’s cargo chamber. This time he was not discovered until the boat docked at Saigon, his arrest caused by his inability to resist running to a railing and watching the city of his father come into view.

  Sobhraj the Tailor went to the port with anger and peeled off 245 francs to pay for his stowaway son’s passage. He was not entirely surprised, as a letter had recently come from his relatives saying that Charles was arrogant, ungrateful, disobedient, and probably dishonest, for a small amount of money had coincidentally vanished upon his leave-taking. Sobhraj lashed his son with certain facts:

  Item One: Charles had only a temporary visitor’s permit valid for six months in Vietnam, and that time was almost gone. It could not be renewed. Without proper papers, Charles could be arrested and jailed.

  Item Two: The only solution was to spend the required year in India so that a passport and citizenship could be obtained.

  Item Three: Nobody in the entire world gave a damn about Charles Sobhraj, certainly not his fancy mother in France.

  Item Four: The tailor had no more money or patience to waste on a youth who did not appreciate efforts made in his behalf.

  “I have sent my son back to Bombay for the last time,” wrote Sobhraj to his cousins. “If he does not stay there and obtain his citizenship, then let the demons take him!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The S.S. Laos docked at Bombay in March 1962, the slumbrous time of India when the subcontinent cooks under a torturous sun that will not relent until the June monsoons drench the steel-hard earth and cause steam to rise like water thrown on an overheated skillet. One passenger was not permitted to disembark. A letter of explanation was promptly mailed to Saigon.

  “Dear Mr. Sobhraj,” wrote the maritime company’s Bombay representative, “The immigration authorities in Bombay have refused to let your son, Charles Gurmukh, get off the LAOS because he does not have proper papers or a passport. The LAOS will be in port here seven weeks, sailing on July 2 for Marseilles. Your son informs us that you will cable funds required to send the boy back to Saigon the next available ship. Please advise immediately.”

  Waiting impatiently, Charles was condemned to spend several days in the fourth-class quarters, a chamber that rode below the waterline and that reeked of vomit and clammy walls. Every day he asked anyone who passed by in a uniform if his father had responded to the letter. And every day the answer was negative. Finally someone took pity and ordered the young man transferred to the Port of Bombay jail, which was at least better than waiting on the oven-like ship. In the fourth week of his detainment, a telegram arrived. It was terse. “Cannot raise further funds. Send Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj to his mother in Marseilles. Signed: H. Sobhraj.” When the commandant of the port summoned Charles and read the cable, he burst out crying. “It’s not true,” insisted Charles. “There’s a mistake. My father is a wealthy man and he loves me.”

  The commandant shrugged. There was no mistake. Unless money was received from somebody to pay further passage on the Laos from India to France, then the only alternative was to turn the matter over to the Bombay police. Charles would be jailed as a stowaway and a stateless person. Already the youngster knew enough of bureaucratic India to realize that this would take months if not years to straighten out, and in the meantime he would rot in a Bombay jail. His fellow prisoners had told him that a twenty-year sentence would not be unusual.

  “Am in desperate trouble,” cabled Charles collect to Song. “Please send money for passage from Bombay to Marseilles. I beg you to help your loving son. Please, please. In the name of God.” At the same time, the shipping company wrote a letter of explanation to Song, revealing that the French Consul was touched by the young man’s plight and had agreed to give him a three-month visa for entry to France. But unless Song cabled 661 new French francs for passage, and an additional 379 francs to pay for one of Charles’ stowaway ventures from Bombay to Saigon earlier in the year, then the boy would be charged as an illegal alien and would face the courts of India.

  In Marseilles, Song did not show the telegram to her husband, for she knew that he would refuse to spend another centime on his stepson. She put the documents in her jewelry box, the temptation being to ignore them. But at night she could not sleep, thinking of her firstborn child in an Indian jail. Then two more cables arrived, both desperate, their tone indicating that Charles was standing on the gallows and only his mother could bribe the hangman and forestall execution. That did it. Song sold two of her rings and, together with a few hundred francs she kept hidden to finance her love of gambling, cabled passage to Bombay. “I expect you to pay me back,” she wrote. “We are poor people and you have caused us more trouble and money than all the other children combined. This is the last help I will ever give you.”

  When Charles disembarked in Marseilles, he ran to the telephone and called his mother, full of filial devotion and gratitude. From the depths of his misery in Bombay, then across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean—and home, Charles had resurrected his mother in his mind and painted her in the colors of a saint. He now wanted to erase the years of antagonism between them. He knew now that she was his anchor, not the tailor in Saigon who h
ad hired him as a slave and who had expelled him to the degradation of an Indian village.

  But Song’s arms were not flung wide to embrace the prodigal son. She was cool on the telephone. Yes, she was glad that Charles was safely back in Marseilles. But no, she could not offer the boy a bed in her cramped home. Her husband was once again ill, at this moment in another hospital. The situation was such that Charles could not re-enter the family structure, for it was fragile enough already. Darreau demanded that the house remain silent as a crypt at all times, and Charles brought out the noisy worst in the other children. But, keep in touch, suggested Song in brush-off, and repay the money as quickly as possible. It was bread snatched from the mouths of his half-brothers and sisters.

  Charles’ situation was precarious. His visa was good only for ninety days, and the French consul in India had warned him that under no conditions could it be extended. And he had no money. But in order to find work, Charles needed not only a permis de séjour, permitting him to live in France, but a permis de travail, a work permit given to an alien, a difficult document to obtain. In the autumn of 1962, Charles worked for several restaurants along the waterfront, earning as little as five francs a day because he had no papers and was thus in the category of Algerian immigrants who flooded the city and rarely found employment more enriching than sweeping leaves from gutters with brooms made of sticks. Seldom did Charles last more than a day or two before an angry hauteur spewed from his lips and caused immediate termination. “I speak four languages and have traveled over much of the world,” he snapped at one restaurateur. “My father is a millionaire in Saigon and you want me to clean out toilets for fifty centimes an hour!”